'Experts' Who Lied To Us About COVID Confused Why We Didn't Listen To Them
One of the many defining features of the COVID-19 pandemic, along with media misinformation and gaslighting from politicians, was the authoritative voice of "The Experts."
The chain of command during the pandemic was clear; "The Experts" unilaterally determined what "The Science" said, dictated "The Science" to politicians and the public, and the public was supposed to fall in line regardless of the consequences. And boy were there consequences. School closures created horrific learning loss, businesses were shut down and then permanently closed, and millions of people saw their lives disrupted in unimaginable ways.
What made these disruptions, losses and authoritarian mandates worse was the lack of supporting evidence behind them. Soon after the first lockdowns in March 2020, informed members of the public realized how "The Experts" were using poorly reasoned guesswork to close down society.
Despite their failures, "The Experts" have committed to an absurdist path in their search for the real villains of the pandemic. It wasn't their fault for getting the actual science wrong, it wasn't the politicians' fault for abandoning critical thinking and rationality. It was our fault, for not listening better.
WASHINGTON, DC - National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins holds up a model of the coronavirus as he testifies before a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee looking into the budget estimates for National Institute of Health (NIH) and the state of medical research on Capitol Hill on May 26, 2021. (Photo by Sarah Silbiger-Pool/Getty Images)
Francis Collins Shows Insanity Of ‘Experts’ Is A Permanent Feature
Masks and mask mandates were a defining feature of the pandemic, thanks in part to ever-shifting guidance from The Experts™. CDC and other organizations initially said that masks should not be worn, with Anthony Fauci infamously explaining that they didn't help or provide the assumed amount of protection. Then weeks later, after pressure from a sociologist's column in The New York Times, they altered course.
Suddenly, masks were not only recommended, they were necessary. Lives would be saved, grandmothers would be protected, virtue could be signaled…it was a complete about-face, with no new scientific evidence to evaluate. But in an excerpt from his new book published in The Atlantic, Francis Collins, the former head of the NIH, says that the CDC's nonexistent reasoning was "correct."
"There weren’t much data to go on, and this was a genuine crisis—public-health agencies were doing the best they could with inadequate information," Collins writes. "Initial recommendations included some confusing information about masks not being necessary. But then, once it became clear that the virus could be readily transmitted by people who had no symptoms, the CDC reversed course and recommended that masks should be worn. The recommendation was correct, but the reasoning was not always made clear."
Collins' suggestion that asymptomatic transmission was the justification for masking is absurd. The flu is spread asymptomatically, yet the CDC and other public health organizations never recommended masking to stop transmission because all the studies and data showed that they were ineffective. If, as Collins says, there "wasn't much data to go on" in a fast moving pandemic, there's no reasonable, justifiable way for these agencies to abandon decades of data in favor of guesswork.
This kind of incompetence and poor reasoning skills is precisely why trust in the "Experts" disintegrated. And Collins wasn't, and isn't done taking a blowtorch to his credibility yet.
More Gaslighting And Lying From ‘The Experts’
Collins claims that "data" shows that the measures he and Fauci supported were effective. Lying repeatedly and profusely in the process.
"Today, many argue that these measures in the first few months of the pandemic were too draconian," Collins says. "Some even say they did more harm than good. But a detailed 2021 evidence-based analysis of the outcomes of ‘flatten the curve’ measures in 41 countries showed that most of them provided benefit in reducing transmission during the first wave of the pandemic. Of the various measures, closing schools and universities and limiting gatherings to 10 people or fewer had the most significant effect. Closing nonessential businesses delivering personal services (such as gyms and hair salons) had a moderate effect. Targeted closures of face-to-face businesses with a high risk of infection, such as restaurants, bars, and nightclubs, had a small to moderate effect. Adding a stay-at-home order provided only a small additional benefit to these other measures. Those are the data."
That is not remotely what the data shows. Because it's not data, it's modeling.
The study Collins refers to uses "cross-country modeling" to estimate the effects of NPI's across countries. The study authors even acknowledge these limitations in their discussion.
"Furthermore, the data are retrospective and observational, meaning that unobserved factors could confound the results. Also, NPI effectiveness estimates can be highly sensitive to arbitrary modeling decisions, as shown by two recent replication studies," they write. Not to mention that they examined quite literally a two-month period of time.
"However, we need to be careful when interpreting this study’s results. We only analyzed the effect NPIs had between January and the end of May 2020," they explain.
There were effectively no NPIs between January and March. The vast majority of restrictions came into effect in mid-late March, some even after May 2020. Using this modeling study as "proof" that the NPIs worked isn't just incompetence, it's maliciously misleading pseudoscience. That's what Collins did. And it's why his reputation continues to sink.
COVID Should Have Brought Us Together, Says Man Who Divided Us
Collins says we need to "learn" from the division that ensued during the pandemic.
"We urgently need to learn from what happened here. The worst pandemic in more than a century, driven by the dangerous and highly contagious virus SARS-CoV-2, should have energized and unified us. COVID was the real enemy. But instead, the pandemic tore us apart," he says.
While he does take some responsibility for his failings, he again refuses to accept that his facts and evidence were wrong.
"But before blaming all of this on other sources of misinformation and disinformation, I have to point the finger at myself and my other colleagues as well; our communication was not always as clear or as helpful as it needed to be.
This loss of an anchor to facts and evidence should never have happened in a society based on reason and knowledge. If we are serious as individuals and communities about traveling down the road to wisdom, we have a lot of lessons to learn—whether in dealing with the next pandemic, addressing climate change, or defending democratic elections."
Collins still, after repeatedly being proven wrong about every single aspect of COVID policy, blames the public for not believing him, not himself for misleading the public. That's why there will never be any accountability or actual progress made in the scientific community. Because they cannot accept or envision a world in which they are the problem. Not because of communication failures, but because they were wrong. They divided us by lying, by misleading, by misinterpreting the science, data and evidence. By cherry-picking information that supported their conclusions, demonizing anyone who pointed out their failings, and ignoring a laundry list of studies that contradicted them.
It's your fault that you saw through Collins' incompetence and arrogance. He should have done a better job of clearly lying to you. And we should ensure that experts do a better job of lying about other political issues to convince the public to do what they want. That's the conclusion he makes. It's an authoritarian view, unsurprising coming from someone whose impulse towards power and control led us down a path of idiotic destruction.